sermon for pentecost 10 / trinity 9

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In today’s Gospel reading our Lord tells a parable about a sower, who sows good seed, and who has an enemy who then comes and sows weeds among the wheat. And when the grain comes up, the weeds come up with it. The landowners servants ask whether they ought to go and tear up the weeds. The landowner tells his servants to let the weeds and the wheat grow together “lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them.” The master is concerned for the wheat: he does not want to endanger any of it. So he says: “Let both grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.”

The Lord does not leave us to guess at the interpretation of this parable. At the behest of the disciples, he gives us a point-by-point explanation: “He who sows the good seed is the Son of man; the field is the world, and the good seed means the sons of the kingdom; the weeds are the sons of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the close of the age, and the reapers are angels. Just as the weeds are gathered and burned with fire, so will it be at the close of the age. The Son of man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and throw them into the furnace of fire; there men will weep and gnash their teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.”

There is a kind of rudimentary theodicy in this parable. [A theodicy is an account of the existence of evil.] God has sown good seed. He has created the world and all that is in it, and he has said that it is all very good (Gen. 1.31). Yet even in this parable, we may discern a mysterious and personal malignant power, working secretly, behind the scenes of creation, to bring destruction and ruin. We can almost hear the whispering of the Serpent in the enemy creeping through the field by night, planting weeds while the world slumbers: “You will not die. For God knows that when you eat… your eyes will be opened….” (Gen. 3.4-5).

Surely we are like the sheaves of wheat, straining upward toward the sun, and watered by the dew. And an honest examination of conscience will disclose a million instances of the beguiling voice, seeking to cut us off from the sunlight, whispering in our ear: You don’t need to listen to the voice of the Lord, you have no need of his commandments, you don’t need to serve him, you don’t need to worship him, you don’t need to love him.

And we are individually sown among unique weeds because we are each susceptible to particular beguilings, and particular predispositions to deception. One will be tempted by power, tempted to dominate and control situations and people; another will be tempted by indulgence in food or drink; another will be tempted by greed and the desire for material gain; another will be tempted sexually, to live by a standard other than what has been taught in Scripture. We are each surrounded by inducements to sin that are peculiar to us, to our proclivities and backgrounds; but the form is always the same: You don’t need to listen to what God has said; you don’t need to honor and obey him; you don’t need to love him; you are different; you are exempt; seek fulfillment on your own. That is the substance of the Serpent’s words to Eve, and that is the substance of his words to each of us. We all live in the world, and we are all surrounded by weeds that seek to cut us off from the sunlight and from the dew. And this is how it will be until the close of the age, when “the Son of man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and throw them into the furnace of fire; there men will weep and gnash their teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.”

But what are we to do in the meantime? We are to do what every successful sheaf of wheat does: to strain upward toward the sun, which is Christ; to drink up the dew, which is his teaching, the catholic faith: we are to grow strong in the Lord and the power of his might, to shoulder out the causes of sin, and to close our ears to the enticements of the world, the flesh, and the devil, knowing that however they may strike our fancy, they lead only and inevitably to the furnace of fire where men weep and gnash their teeth. We are to live in the conviction that Christ has conquered, and that we have but to stand aside, to deny ourselves that the Lord of creation might break forth powerfully and unstoppably within us.

He has already won, we have only to get out of the way of his victory. Yet this is hard. It means self-denial. “For the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life” (Matt. 7.14). And this is why we must keep our eyes, our minds and our hearts, fixed resolutely on Jesus Christ – because he is the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, by which we are saved. He alone has conquered, and in him alone is our salvation. Like sheaves of wheat straining ever upward toward the sun, we must look constantly to Jesus, to seek him, to sigh after him, to wait on him. And like watered plants, we must live by the doctrine of the Church, “by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4.4).

And though this is hard, we can stand in the conviction of St. Paul, who said in today’s reading from Romans: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

catholicism 101 -- part 13

Catholicism 101
(The outline of this series is taken from Father Vernon Staley’s book The Catholic Religion.)
Church of the Holy Cross
May 25, 2008
Part 13
Christian Duty: Christian Belief: The Three Great Creeds: Concerning God

• “…maker of heaven and earth.”

• If we go back in time, to the beginning: “In the beginning God…”

• God is first. He precedes all.

• From all eternity, unto endless ages of ages, God is there.

• Remember, though, that the eternity of God means preeminently that he exists outside of time – not that he exists forever “in both directions” (though it means that too).

• Last time we talked a little bit about God as eternally Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And so it is.

• God cannot be eternally Father without eternally being Father of the Son. Likewise the Son cannot be eternally Son without being eternally Son of the Father. And the Holy Spirit is their mutual delight, their mutual love.

• This is the inner life of God – the “divine economy” – what we may licitly say about what God is like “inside”.

• The aseity of God means that he alone is self-sufficient, self-sourced.

• He is that greater than which nothing can be conceived.

• He is perfectly perfect (so to speak). He needs nothing to increase his perfection. He lacks nothing.

• Creation is therefore a mystery. It has baffled philosophers since the beginning of philosophy: why is there something rather than nothing?

• Our appeal to God’s eternity (i.e. his timelessness) take the contradiction out of the doctrine of creation, but not the mystery.

• There was never a time at which the created order was not. But “prior” to the beginning there was God alone.

• Why did God create? That’s the mystery.

• It seems we may say that God created, mysteriously, out of love – that before we existed, God loved us.

• It seems also that, because God is eternal, his act of creation is an eternal (timeless) act. There was never a time at which God did not create.

• It seems to be a part of his nature to create.

• So we might say he “owes it to himself” to create – i.e. in order to be who he is.

• In any event: God does create. And he creates “ex nihilo” – out of nothing.

• There was not some block of raw material from which God constructed the universe. There was nothing. And out of nothing God called something into being, by his word.

• “By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear.” (Heb. 11.3)

• Cf. Genesis 1: “And God said… and it was so.”

• Cf. Psalm 33.8-9: “Let all the earth fear the Lord; * let all who dwell in the world stand in awe of him. / For he spoke, and it came to pass; * he commanded and it stood fast.”

• This is why God as Creator is differentiated from all finite acts of creation. When we create something, we create it out of something. When God creates, he creates out of nothing.

• God creates as Trinity:

• Genesis 1.1-2 “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

• John 1.1ff: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.”

• Psalm 33.6: “By the word of the Lord [the Son] were the heavens made, * by the breath of his mouth [the Spirit] all the heavenly hosts.”

• The six days of creation need not be understood as six twenty-four hour periods (how could the day be measured before there was day and night?). Genesis is depicting the hierarchy of creation. Each stage of creation is succeeded by more perfect elements, until we reach the creation of men and women, the apex and pinnacle of God’s created work: finally, moral / spiritual creatures made in the image and likeness of God.

• You can believe in the Biblical account of creation and believe in Evolution.

• The Bible is not a science text. As a datum of communication, it has a different purpose: to disclose God. As such, Genesis is the story of God’s creation, of man’s relationship with God, and of the poisoning of that relationship by sin, and the beginning of God’s plan of redemption. It was not written by modern people obsessed with empiricism and scientific method and whatnot. It is as much (or more) poetry than history in the modern sense of that term.

• In creation we see God’s first language. God reveals himself in his act of creation, and in what he has created. The “analogiam creationis” – or the “analogiam entis”.

sermon for pentecost 4 / holy cross / june 8 2008

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In today’s short Gospel reading, we hear the story of the calling of St. Matthew. Matthew was a publican, a tax collector, a Jew who collaborated with the occupying Romans, a group of people who were known not only as collaborationists, but who were notorious for “skimming off the top” – defrauding those from whom they collected taxes. He was, in short, a great sinner.

“Jesus… saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax office; and he said to him, "Follow me." And he rose and followed him.”

This is the beginning of the story of Saint Matthew, Holy Matthew, Matthew the Apostle and Evangelist. The story begins with obedience. There’s nothing noteworthy about this character – accept perhaps that his sins are particularly notorious and public. He was shunned and condescended-to by the religious authorities, and he was probably only interested in making a buck, and it didn’t bother him that he was breaking the rules of the self-appointed religious authorities.

But then along comes Jesus. The Gospel simply says that Jesus saw Matthew, and said to him “Follow me,” and Matthew got up and followed him.

Jesus says to every heart, “Follow me.” And every life that’s changed for the better, in an ultimate sense, begins with a decision to follow Jesus.

Notice the very next thing that happens: Matthew throws a party, and many of his friends, who are also “tax collectors and sinners”, come and find Jesus because Matthew has introduced them to him -- because the ORIENTATION of Matthew’s life has changed: now all of his activity is Jesus-centric, and that makes all the difference. He has been enabled to look out beyond the narrow constraints of his former egoism. Now he sees the world with reference to Jesus, and he brings others to share this liberative encounter with the Messiah.

And then the ever-wiley Pharisees arrive, with their pharisaical indignation: “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” And the answer is quite simple, almost tautological: those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. And so the Lord reveals the exact difference between the publicans and sinners on the one hand, and the Pharisees on the other: the Lord desires penitence, a heart aware of its sinfulness and desirous of nothing but mercy. But we are apt to miss the central element of the Lord’s rebuke of the Pharisees in this passage: and that is its Christological claim, the self-reference of Jesus, and his self assertion as the Physician. That is the remarkable thing, and at bottom the problem with the Pharisees is their attitude toward JESUS: their failure to see TRUTH in his face, and with it the power to bind up and to heal, to forgive sins, to cleanse from all unrighteousness.

We are apt to think that the problem with the Pharisees is that they have passed judgment on the others, that they have reduced the personhood of Matthew and his friends to mere “tax collectors and sinners”. We are apt to find offense in this pejorativity, as it were. But the failure, the sin of the Pharisees, is that unlike Matthew and his sinner friends, the Pharisees DON’T SEE IN JESUS SOMEONE WORTH FOLLOWING.

It isn’t that Matthew and his friends aren’t sinners. They ARE… and they know it. But they have a conviction of their need for redemption, and so they hurry after Jesus, knowing that he can heal and forgive them. Knowing that he is all about mercy. That is what God seeks in each of us: not a heart hardened against the divine mercy, but malleable, an open heart, a heart willing to be pierced by forgiveness. But this first means we must acknowledge that we need to be forgiven.

St. John put it succinctly in his first epistle: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us” (1 John 1.8-10).

But it begins with penance, as we see in the example of St. Matthew, in the acknowledgement that we are no better than tax-collectors and sinners. And then it continues with a with a DECISION, a WILLINGNESS to follow Jesus, and to reorient our lives with reference to him.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

catholicism 101 -- part 12

Catholicism 101

(The outline of this series is taken from Father Vernon Staley’s book The Catholic Religion.)

Church of the Holy Cross

May 18, 2008

Part 12

Christian Duty: Christian Belief: The Three Great Creeds: Concerning God: The Mystery of the Holy Trinity

- We believe in one God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

• The Church’s teaching about the Holy Trinity is summarized in the words of the Athanasian Creed: “The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God; and yet they are not three gods, but one God.”

• Our teaching about the Holy Trinity is revealed in Scripture, and has been taught by the Christian Church, and believed by Christians, from the first.

• It is a mystery which transcends human reason, but is not contrary to human reason.

• For example: it is reasonable to assume that human religion should contain mysteries. And it is most reasonable to assume that if there is a God, that his being should be mysterious (and more than that: a mystery).

• Imagine sitting in a chair with a dog staring at you. The dog might understand certain things about you (that you are friendly towards him, that you are the source of his food and comfort, etc.). But the dog would certainly not understand human nature fully.

• Human persons are higher than dogs in the order of creation. But humans at least share with dogs their situatedness WITHIN the order of creation. Whereas humans are much “higher” than dogs, God is INFINITELY “higher” than humans. At least humans and dogs share the status of creature. God is literally off the charts. He is not even in the scale of comparison, because he is the creator. If you made a list of everything in the universe, God would not be on it .

• In the last session we discussed the suitability of Christianity’s lofty teachings, as words must necessarily cease with respect to God: they all fall short, and thus may serve to lead us to silent adoration. So it is with the Holy Trinity. At a certain point, explanation must come to an end, and one must proceed toward God in silence and in faith.

• Father Staley says: “Though a philosopher cannot explain the doctrine of the Trinity in Unity, a child can believe it.”

• Note what the Athanasian Creed says: “And the catholic faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity.” Note it says that the catholic faith is WORSHIP – not necessarily understanding.

- “We believe in one God, the Father the Almighty…”

• God is the eternal Father.

• He is eternal Father because he eternally begets his only Son.

• In the Nicene Creed we say “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ; the only Son of God; ETERNALLY BEGOTTEN of the Father…”

• The Rite I language is more helpful here: “…And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of his Father before all worlds…” This is in a sense a better rendition of the Latin original: “Et in unum Dominum Iesum Christum, Filium Dei Unigenitum, et ex Patre natum ante omnia saecula…” And of the Greek: “Καὶ εἰς ἕνα Κύριον Ἰησοῦν Χριστόν, τὸν Υἱὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ τὸν μονογενῆ, τὸν ἐκ τοῦ Πατρὸς γεννηθέντα πρὸ πάντων τῶν αἰώνων”. In both cases: “…begotten from the Father before all ages…”

• In other words, before creation, when all there was was God, “then” the Son was begotten – i.e. “eternally”, beyond the domain of the temporal.

• So God has always been, and is eternally Father and Son. There was never a time when he was not Father of the eternal and only Son.

• Annoying but important answer to feminist critique: God reveals himself as Father (and reveals himself as ETERNALLY Father). So it is not the case that God is in the same way Mother. He does describe himself with feminine metaphors in Scripture.

• In Matthew 23.37, Jesus quotes 2 Esdras when he says: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not!”

• 4 Ezra 1.28-30: “Thus says the Lord Almighty: Have I not entreated you as a father entreats his sons or a mother her daughters or a nurse her children, that you should be my people and I should be your God, and that you should be my sons and I should be your father? I gathered you as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.”

• Both of these passages describe God’s activity as being like that of a mother, or a hen. This is different from God’s self revelation AS Father.

• It is also true that, as we have said, all language ultimately fails when faced with the reality of God, and so therefore the language of fatherhood likewise proves equivocal. However:

• 1) certain language concerning God is revealed by God himself (as for example the whole of Scripture), and is thus in a sense sanctioned and hallowed by being “the Word of the Lord” and not merely “the words of various loquacious people ABOUT the Lord”.

• 2) The analogy runs in the opposite direction from that we would naturally be predisposed to think. With respect to this discussion, it is not merely the case that the Christian conception of God (and hence Christian language about God) is the product of patriarchal society(s), and thus that the Christian God is a social construction in the image and likeness of human patriarchs. The opposite is in fact the case: human fatherhood is the shadow, constructed by God as a properly inadequate mystical cognate of God’s paternity.

• This is what St. Paul is driving at in Ephesians 3.14-15: “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.” The Greek word here translated “family” is “patria” = “fatherhood” – which in Greek had the connotation “kindred” or “family”. But the broader, more literal point germane to our discussion is that human fatherhood is derivative (and fallen and defective), not the other way around. This is the teaching of Scripture and of the Church.

• I don’t want to belabor this point, but it is an important one in our contemporary cultural milieu, and we will see much later that it has theological ramifications (with respect to the “analogiam creationis” – or the sacramental iconography of creation).

• God is the Father of the eternal Son. He is also in a sense the Father of ALL, because he has made all. And as human beings are the apex of his creative work, he is the Father of all humanity.

• Yet he is the Father of Christians in a more excellent way, because through faith and baptism, we have now have Jesus Christ, the only and eternal Son, as our BROTHER. Thus we gain God as our Father in a new and important way. This is deeper significance behind the first two words of the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father…” and it is why “we are BOLD to say” it. Because as prodigal sons and daughters, we were “no longer worthy to be called your son” (Luke 15.21). Yet God wills that despite our unworthiness, he grants us kinship with himself – a new and more excellent sonship, because it comes from the only and eternal Son.

• Galatians 4.4ff: “But when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ So through God you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son then an heir.”

• Father Staley: “The Son of God was made Son of Man, in order that the sons of men may become sons of God. In Holy Baptism we are made members of Christ, and the children of God – children of God, because members of Christ the only-begotten Son of God.”

catholicism 101 -- part 11

Catholicism 101
(The outline of this series is taken from Father Vernon Staley’s book The Catholic Religion.)
Church of the Holy Cross
May 11, 2008
Part 11
Christian Duty: Christian Belief: The Three Great Creeds: Concerning God

- Last time we considered the existence of God. Today:
- The Nature of God. Remember the definition given by St. Anselm (in the “ontological proof” for the existence of God): God is that “that than which greater cannot be thought” – i.e. he is the greatest thing conceivable. This implies:

• God is Spirit (John 4.24).

• As Spirit, God is “incorporeal” – i.e. he is not composed of matter as we are. He is without spatial dimensions, and he transcends time (he is “eternal” – more on this later).

• He cannot be seen with the eyes of the body.

• “No one has ever seen God” (John 1.18, and 1 John 4.12).

• He cannot be touched with the hands.

• He cannot be heard with the ears.

• Scripture speaks of the “face of God” (e.g. Genesis 33.10), and of his hands (e.g. Deut 4.34), and of “the eyes of the Lord” (e.g. 1 Peter 3.12) etc. But these phrases are analogical. Because there is no way to speak of the actions of an incorporeal being, a Spirit, without recourse to corporeal concepts and words.

• God is self-existent.

• Exodus 3.14: when Moses asks God his name, he says “YHWH” – “I AM WHO I AM.”

• God is the creator of all that “is”. As such he transcends “is-ness” – he transcends the being which we know by “being” among those things that “are” – those things which he has made (namely everything).

• God is eternal.

• He has no beginning and no end.

• Just as he has no spatial location or extension, so he has no temporal location or extension. He is timeless – he abides outside the framework of time. This is expressed in Scripture: God is he “who was, and is, and is to come” (Revelation 4.8). But even this is analogical. We find ourselves trying to describe with temporal words a being who transcends temporality

• With God all is as though an eternal present: “Before the mountains were brought forth, or the land and the earth were born, * from age to age you are God” (Psalm 90.2) (yet these words, too, fail).

• So far it doesn’t look very likely that we will be able to say much accurate about God. He is chiefly identified in his being DIFFERENT from everything, and since our words and our thoughts arise within the ambit of “everything” (within the sphere of creation), its not likely that they will prove adequate to circumscribe a being who is characterized chiefly by being “different from everything”.

• Saint John of Damascus (“Doctor of the Church”, 600’s-700’s AD) wrote in his book “An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith” – God “does not belong to the class of existing things: not that He has no existence , but that He is above all existing things, nay even above existence itself. For if all forms of knowledge have to do with what exists, assuredly that which is above knowledge must certainly be also above essence : and, conversely, that which is above essence will also be above knowledge.”

• So the transcendence of God, his ineffability (our inability to speak accurately of him) and his transcendence of knowledge are at the center of the teaching of orthodox Christianity.

• God is holy.

• Not only is he transcendent, above and beyond all things, but as such he is also the supreme good.

• The angelic hymn sung in his presence is “Holy, Holy, Holy” (Isaiah 6.3).

• Revelation 4.6 & 8: “…round the throne, on each side of the throne, are four living creatures, full of eyes in front and behind…. And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all round and within, and day and night they never cease to sing, "Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty.”

• We join in this hymn at every mass.

• God’s perfection, his goodness, his holiness, his transcendence are such that by comparison: “…the heavens are not clean in his sight…” (Job 15.15).

• God is almighty (omnipotent).

• His will is supreme, governing the highest order of magnitude and the lowest.

• “In the beginning, O Lord, you laid the foundations of the earth, * and the heavens are the work of your hands; / They shall perish, but you will endure, they all shall wear out like a garment; * as clothing you will change them, and they shall be changed; / But you are always the same, * and your years will never end” (Psalm 102.25f).

• “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father's will” (Matthew 10.29).

• Though creation rebelled against God, yet at the end of time, all things will be subjected to him, “that God may be everything to every one” (1 Cor. 15.28).

• God’s omnipotence means that he can do anything (“with God, all things are possible” Matt. 19.26). But this does not mean he can do absurd things. He can’t sin, because that would be a violation of his own nature (it would be a logical contradiction). Similarly, he can’t cause a triangle to have four sides. He can’t make a rock so big that he can’t pick it up. God can do anything. These are non-things.

• God is everywhere (omnipresent).

• This means that in virtue of his transcendence and perfection, he is mysteriously present to all things. Or rather, perhaps it is better to say that all things are eternally and immediately present to him.

• “…before him no creature is hidden, but all are open and laid bare to the eyes of him with whom we have to do” (Hebrews 4.13).

• “God is LOVE” (1 John 4.8).

• God is now what he has always been. He has always been love. This is a part of his perfection (in a sense, the WHOLE of his perfection – because he IS love).

• The love of God necessarily has an object. If it didn’t, his love would be unrequited, and his desired unfulfilled; and he would thus not be “that than which greater cannot be thought” – because a being whose love has an object, and who is himself beloved is greater than a being with unfulfilled and unrequited love.

• The beloved of God is the Son of God, and this love is substantive, fructive, generative – God BEGETS the Son in love eternally.

• The perfect, eternal, and mutual love of the Father and the Son is itself the Holy Spirit, consubstantial with the Father and the Son. That is, this love of Father and Son is itself God with the same “Godness” (the same divinity, the same “essence”, the same “substance”) of the Father and the Son. So God is love.

• So the realization that “God is love” prepares the mind for God’s disclosure of himself, of his identity in the teaching of the Church – that he is “Three persons; one God”.

catholicism 101 -- part 10

CATHOLICISM 101

(The outline of this series is taken from Father Vernon Staley’s book The Catholic Religion.)

Church of the Holy Cross
April 27, 2008

Part 10
Christian Duty: Christian Belief: The Three Great Creeds

- “I believe in God, the Father Almighty…”

• The Bible doesn’t demonstrate the existence of God, it assumes the existence of God.

• That God is, is thought by the authors of Scripture to be a universal instinct of the human heart.

• Part of the problem with contemporary people is that their hearts have very often been removed, or turned to stone (as CS Lewis warned in The Abolition of Man.

• Thus the Lord, foreseeing this problem, says through the prophet Ezekiel: “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezek. 36.26).

• “For man believes with his heart and so is justified…” (Rom. 10.10).

• Yet there is compelling evidence, accessible to the mind and appealing to the intellect.

• There are philosophical demonstrations, like the “Ontological Proof” of St. Anselm – which philosophers have been contemplating for over a thousand years.

• There is, more recently, the “Argument from Fine Tuning” – much discussed in the media lately: the idea that the conditions that would allow life (or even matter) to emerge in the universe can only possibly occur within a very tight range of values for the universe’s physical constants, that if any of these constants were just slightly different than it is, then life would never have been able to evolve in the universe.

• As Gerard Manley Hopkins put it:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the
soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs –
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright
wings.

• What we are after is FAITH in God, not merely a bland acknowledgement that he is. St. James says: you believe that god exists? Congratulations. “Even the demons believe… and shudder” (James 2.19).

• But faith is not just a servile acquiescence to an assertion, uninformed by the mind.

• Faith in God rather implies a relationship, a giving of oneself in trust.

• St. Augustine chronicles his discovery of faith in his Confessions. The famous passage from the beginning says “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” And about the quest for God, St. Augustine says “Whither might I withdraw beyond heaven and earth that from thence my God might come into me, when my God has said ‘I fill heaven and earth’?” Augustine finds God by searching his own heart.

• So you have to have a heart. From the Sayings of the Desert Fathers: Abba Pambo said “If you have a heart, you can be saved.”

• Creation speaks of God.

• Indeed creation is God’s first language, his first disclosure of himself, the analogiam creationis (which is why catholic Christians put such an emphasis on materiality – bread wine, male, female, etc. – it speaks of God, or rather God speaks of himself through his making it what it is). Gen. 1.1.

• Psalm 102.25: “In the beginning, O LORD, you laid the foundations of the earth, * and the heavens are the work of your hands…”

• As Hopkins said, the world is CHARGED with the grandeur of God.

• Romans 1.20: “Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.”

• Part of the danger we face is allowing our culture to take away our hearts of flesh and give us hearts of stone, at which point God becomes invisible to us. Our challenge is to see him everywhere, but we have to have FAITH to do that, and to have faith, we have to have a heart.

• St. Augustine, again in the Confessions: “I questioned the earth, and it said, ‘I am not He;’ and all that is in it confessed the same. I questioned the sea and the depths, and the creeping things which have life, and they replied, ‘We are not your God, seek above us.’ I questioned the blowing winds, and the whole air with its inhabitants replied ‘I am not God.’ I questioned the heavens, the sun, moon, stars; ‘Neither are we God whom you seek’ they said. And I said to all those things which stand about the doors of my flesh, ‘You have told me of my God, that you are not He; tell me now something of him.’ And they cried out with a loud voice, ‘He made us.’”

• Belief in God is nearly universal in humanity – it is built into our souls. God is at the bottom of the endless inquisitiveness of young children first being awed by the world: “Why…? Why…? Why…?” He lies just beyond the reach of the instruments of the astronomers and physicists – he is the object of their search, the cause of causes.

• And if he is there, then it stands to reason that he would reveal himself to his creatures. And so he has: through creation itself, in the heart of man, in Scripture, and finally and definitively in his Son.

catholicism 101 -- part 9

CATHOLICISM 101

(The outline of this series is taken from Father Vernon Staley’s book The Catholic Religion.)

Church of the Holy Cross
April 20, 2008

Part 9
Christian Duty: Christian Belief: The Three Great Creeds

- The Apostles’ Creed

• An ancient creed, dating back to the earliest days of the Church (no one knows when it was first formulated).

• Called “Apostles’” Creed because it is a distillation of the teaching of the Apostles, containing the central truths which they passed on to the world, which they had learned from Jesus himself.

• Phrases and quotations from the Apostles’ Creed are found in very early writers, but a complete version of it is not found in writing until the late second century (late 100’s a.d.)

• The Apostles’ Creed as we know it is first found in writing in Rufinus, writing in the fourth century (300’s a.d.).

• Staley writes: “The late appearance of the Creed in writing is accounted for by the fact that it was regarded as a precious secret, and committed to memory, being taught to persons just before baptism.

• In the early Church, baptism occurred only twice a year, at Easter and on Whitsun (Pentecost – the Latin name for Pentecost was “Dominica in Albis” – the “Sunday in white” – taking its name probably from the white baptismal garments of the newly baptized – “Albs” or “white garments”).

• On the eve of Baptism, candidates would be taught the Apostles’ Creed, which they were expected to memorize. This ritual was called the “traditio symboli” – the “handing over of the password [i.e. creed]”.

• At their baptism, candidates were asked to recite the Creed to the Bishop. This was called the “reditio symbolum” – the “returning of the password”.

• After their recitation of the Creed, their taking it onto their own lips and making it their own profession, the candidates were baptized. It was as if there was thence a mutual recognition between the candidate and the community of faith, the body of Christ, the “assembly” [ekklesia] of God’s people, the Church. “You and we believe the same thing. As we are one in faith, so now we will be sacramentally one.”

• The Apostles’ Creed is simple and direct as compared with the two other great creeds. It is a straightforward, affirmative distillation of the fundamental truths of Christianity. When these things could be affirmed, in conscience, by a person, the Church considered that person fit to be incorporated into the life of the Body, to be baptized.

• This Creed is given great prominence in Anglicanism. It appears many times throughout the Book of Common Prayer (seven times in the BCP of 1662 – the “mother” of all Anglican Prayer Books).

• It is recited in the official, public prayer of the Church twice daily – at Morning Prayer and at Evening Prayer, which clerics are obliged to recite daily. Thus it is commended to Anglicans as very important by our tradition, and this commendation is manifested liturgically, in the Church’s official prayer.

• Bishop Forbes says “From the days of St. Paul to this, these articles [of the Apostles’ Creed] have been the sum and substance of Christianity. Nothing less than this is sufficient. Nothing more than this is of absolute necessity to salvation. When a child is baptized, the Church demands no more of him, or of his sponsors, than an assent to the Apostles’ Creed.

- The Nicene Creed

• Whereas the Apostles’ Creed is a Latin creed (having its origin in the Western Church), the Nicene Creed is an Eastern Creed, having its origin in the East, originally written in Greek.

• It was deliberately drawn up by the fathers of the first Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in the year 325, and ratified and elaborated, attaining the form in which we find it in our Prayer Book, at the Ecumenical Council held at Constantinople in the year 381. Thus it is sometimes called the “Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed”.

• The Council of Nicaea was convened to decide Christological questions having to do with the teachings of the heretic Arius.

• Arius taught that the Lord was in fact a creature, that he was made by God; that Jesus was not perfect God.

• So the Nicene Creed forcefully affirms the full divinity of Jesus, and thus clarified and circumscribes the interpretation of the teaching of Jesus about himself, as found in the Gospels.

• The end of the creed affirms the full divinity of the Holy Spirit. This part was added at Constantinople, in response to questions surrounding the teachings of the heretic Macedomius (who taught that the Holy Spirit was, in fact, not God).

• The Nicene Creed thus has the weight of very great authority behind it. It is hard for the Church to teach anything more forcefully or authoritatively or definitively. It was decreed by two Ecumenical Councils (which teach infallible – from the Latin “infallibilis”, from “in” = “not” and “fallere” = “deceive” – thus “infallibility” is an epistemic gift of God to his Church for our sake, so that we may not be led astray – and claims to infallibility should be considered within the framework of the Lord’s sayings, e.g. that “I will build my Church” etc.).

• Liturgically, the Nicene Creed is again commended very forcefully, in the summit and source of Christian worship, the mass, the holy Eucharist, where it is recited every Sunday, and on all major feasts.

- The Athanasian Creed

• St. Athanasius of Alexandria was one of the most forceful and stalwart defender of the apostolic teachings about Jesus against Arius. Indeed when much of the Church had succumbed to Arianism, Athanasius endured exile, deposition, and threats of violence, for the sake of the truth. The phrase “Athanasius contra mundum” is a legacy of his fidelity.

• St. Athanasius was one of the main speakers at the Council of Nicaea, and the leader of the orthodox party, and at the time, those who held to the orthodox position were popularly known as “Athanasians” – just as the heretical party were called “Arians”.

• After the death of St. Athanasius (in 373 a.d.), the Athanasian Creed was put forward as a summary of his teaching, and thus of the orthodox teaching about the Trinity and Jesus.

• Where the Apsotles’ Creed puts the faith simply and affirmatively, and where the Nicene Creed rules out false teaching, the Athanasian Creed condemns heretics.

• These condemnations should be read of those who knowingly, willfully, stubbornly reject the teaching of the Church on these issues. The condemnation is not to be read as directed against the ignorant. Cf. Romans 3.19: “Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God.

• The great doctor of the Anglo-Catholic revival in the 19th century, John Keble, wrote of the Athanasian Creed: “Creed of the Saints, and Anthem of the Blest, / And calm-breathed warning of the kindliest love. / Who knows but myriads owe their endless rest / to they recalling, tempted else to rove?”

• Historically, the liturgical place for the Athanasian Creed in Anglicanism was at Morning Prayer on great feasts (Easter, Pentecost, etc.).